page displayed by webpagetest but not desktop browser

Hi,

I have a FOSCAM IP webcam that I can control and view wirelessly in our house using LAN address http://192.168.0.10:8090/ in IE 9.

When I submit the WAN IP (http://174.20.xx.xxx:8090) to webpagetest it successfully shows an image of the expected web interface though the ‘perfomance review’ shows failure for keep-alive, cache static, and CDN detected for each element.

From my desktop all attemps to use a browser (IE 9 or FF 3.6 or Chrome) to view that same WAN fail. E.g. IE reports ‘Oops! Internet Explorer could not connect to 174.20.xxx.xxx:8090’.

Can somebody help me understand why webpagetest can ‘connect’ (and display) the page but a browser on my desktop cannot?

Thanks.

Jim.

Are you trying from within your house our outside? In case you are testing from inside the house, a lot of routers port-forwarding don’t work on the WAN IP if you are accessing from the LAN. If You are testing from somewhere outside then it’s probably a firewall rule somewhere (like if you are on a corporate network) where they aren’t allowing the port 8090 traffic.

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I have been trying from home. Last night I a friend told me they could see the camera. When I was working I would have used remote desktop to my work computer to do the outside-the-LAN test myself.

I haven’t had much need to dianose network problems and so am unfamliar with what are the right tools to use. The browser ‘sits and spins’ and then gives the cryptic ‘could not connect’ message. Ping and tracert simlply timeout with no results. Are there tools that would have enabled me to see that, indeed, it’s the router (Qwest Actiontec PK5000) ‘failing’ to ‘work on the WAN IP’ that is the barrier to connecting (to get the web page)?

Thanks, again.

Jim.

You don’t need to test your desktop since it will always be on the LAN and can access it directly.

If you have a laptop you want to test then take it to a McDonalds or Starbucks and hop on their wifi. If you have a smart phone you want to test just disconnect it from your in-house wifi. You just need to get outside of your network to test it.

I’m 99+% sure that that’s the problem. You will need to use different addresses depending on if you are on the local network or connecting remotely.

Sorry, at this point after hearing that someone I know could see the camera I do assume that it is working ok.

In asking about possible tools I was just expressing a sort of frustration at the ‘brick wall’ I was running into when I was trying to find out what is happening. I have done a fair amount of programming over the years and have been fairly able to debug in those environments but I felt pretty helpless in this situation.

Usually grabbing a wireshark trace of the browser is the best way to REALLY see what is going on at the network layer but you’d probably just see a bunch of SYN packets being sent to the router with no replies. You’d then have to capture network traces on either side of the router to figure out that it’s in the router’s port forwarding itself.

I don’t know how well known it is that port forwarding usually only works from outside of the network so short of stumbling across it I’m not sure there’s much you could do to get to the real root cause.

As far as testing goes, there you just need to get to a machine outside of the firewall and see what happens.